Learn Something New Every Day

This morning I went looking for the reason why Catholics eat fish on Fridays because I was planning a blog post about a fish fry I went to last week. It was at a private club that our senior hall takes a group to every year on the Friday following Ash Wednesday. My husband was a member of that club for over thirty years but I gave up my “spouses membership” after Don died. Their fish dinners are the best in town, bar none, so I don’t like to pass up this yearly opportunity to visit the place again.

Anyway, the following explanation is from Catholicism.org: “…why do Catholics eat fish on Friday – or, better said, why do Catholics abstain from warm-blooded flesh meat on Friday? The obvious answer that every Catholic should know is that it is a penance imposed by the Church to commemorate the day of the Crucifixion of Our Lord – to enable us to make a small sacrifice for the incredible sacrifice He made for our salvation. Why, then, is fish allowed? The drawing of a symbolic fish in the dirt was a way that the early Christians knew each other when it was dangerous to admit in public that one was Christian. Our Lord cooked fish for His Apostles after His Resurrection, and most of these men were fishermen....” 

My Catholic ancestors would be happy that I didn’t just accept the explanation a random internet warrior found in the supposed writings of St. Thomas Aquinas: “Meat tastes too good and is too much of an aphrodisiac to consume while you're supposed to be fasting.” I LOVE, love a good steak but eating one has never made my hormones run and hump the first guy I saw. My ancestors would also be happy that I’m skeptical of a theory that “a medieval pope made a pact with some fishermen buddies - not the fishers-of-men kind but literal fishermen - to boost their business.” Thus he proclaimed Fridays to be fish eating days.

I’m not Catholic but all my relatives on my dad’s side of the family are practicing Catholics. (My dad broke from the Church when he was just boy while his siblings and father stayed with it. If you want to know why, read about it here.) I grew up hearing cousins and my best friend talking about what they gave up for Lent. I get the whole idea of giving up something pleasurable to symbolize Christ’s forty days of wandering in the desert and if I was going to comply---and why would an agnostic do that?---I’d give up coffee. During the power outrage last month that’s what I obsessed about, what I missed the most. According to an online article, coffee is number nine on the list of the ten most popular things to give up for Lent. Chocolate, social networks and alcohol topped the list. 

At the fish fry I was at the beginning of the line of 100 of us from the senior hall. I picked up my food at the service window, sat down and soon an acquaintance sat down across from to me---by choice, the place was full of empty chairs. It’s happened a dozen times before at various events so I assume she likes me. She on the other hand makes me laugh for all the wrong reasons. She wears ruby-red lipstick and she purses her lips like Dana Carvey’s Church Lady character. She talks non-stop and when she’s on a word-riff the following country song often buzzes around inside my head:

“She may be an angel who spends all winter

Bringin' the homeless blankets and dinner

A regular Nobel Peace Prize winner

But I really hate her

I'll think of a reason later.”

For lent I decided to give up my judgmental ways, determined to just sit there contented to listen which I did long after we’d both finished eat. From her, I learned how to “band” baby male calves to cut off the flow of blood to their testicles so in a few weeks their balls just fall off and you can make fuzzy little earrings out of them. I also learned her granddaughter is studying to be an animal dentist and has already been “floating” horse teeth since she was fifteen. Floating, I didn’t know, is filing down teeth that gets too sharp and makes it hard for animals to chew their cuds. Which begs the question, what happens to wild horses who can’t get an appointment to see a dentist? Answer: they chew dirt and peddles attached to wild vegetation and that keeps their teeth worn down. I learn something new every day but the most important thing I learned at the fish fry was I don’t have to like Ms. Ruby-Red Lips to thoroughly enjoy her company for a couple of hours. Tops. Longer than that and I make no promises. ©

A Day to Laugh and Day-Dream

 

It’s only Tuesday and already I’ve found something to get excited about this week. And it’s about time. I’ve been off my stride since the long 4^th of July weekend which seemed to drag into a two week ordeal, making the first half of the month feel like a wash with only one or two exceptional days thrown it. Today I attended a potluck at the senior hall. We have two potlucks a year because we can’t get food for our monthly luncheons through the school system’s food service in the summer like we usually do the rest of the year. One hundred and ten of us each bringing a dish to pass. Can you visualize the food tables? It was something to see and I’m always surprised at how the number of desserts and salads always even out at potlucks. The meat, rolls and drinks were provided for a measly $1.00 each donation.

The entertainment after the potluck was a group of twelve elderly people including an Irish Catholic priest with a brogue I could have listened to all day long. Too bad he is married (in the mystical sense) to the church or I would have tried flirting with him afterwards just to hear him talk. The group did short skits based on the old time radio format---Joe Friday from Dragnet and Fibber McGee and Molly style---and when they weren’t acting they were talking in rhyme. I didn’t catch their group’s name but it was something like The Rhyme and Acting Club. Everything they did had us laughing but the only story I remember, now, was performed by a gal pretending to be a reporter interviewing a wealthy woman with three died husbands and a forth one still living. The first husband, the three-time widow said, was a banker. The second one was a ring leader at a circus, the third husband was a preacher and the forth one an undertaker. The punchline, if you haven’t figured it out by now, was that she had married the first guy for the money, the second man for the show, the third guy to get readying and the forth one to go. Hey, in a senior crowd it got a big laugh.

The most exciting tidbit I picked up, though, was about the parent program to their group. It seems a small local college here in town---we have thirteen---has a program of non-credit classes for people over 50 who want to keep learning and enriching our lives through cultural experiences. No tests or text books required and the courses are taught by their fully accredited professors. The best part is they’ve got art classes! I went to this college for a couple of semester’s decades ago and their Catholic campus hasn’t changed much since those days. The nuns and priests still dress in old order clothing and judging by the priest I saw today they still enjoy good, hardy laughter.

So what does this agnostic/Humanist think she will do come fall? Will I fit in and find classes I want to take? Yes and yes. I’m hoping to sign up for World Music Appreciation and Drawing if the schedule fits into my life. If not, they offer thirty classes in each of six sessions a year, I’m sure to find something I like. They have classes in Philosophy, Exploring Film, Brain Phenomena, Lewis and Clark, one called ‘The Best Advice I Ever Got’ that all look interesting. Plus the curriculum changes from one session to another.

If you’re a long time reader at my blog, I know what you’re thinking: I didn’t like the art classes I took earlier this summer because the instructor was heavy-handed with religion but those classes were one-on-one which made it hard to just blend into the background when you don’t agree with something but don’t want to offend anyone by speaking up. I also get along great with Catholics. My best friend growing up was Catholic. The entire paternal side of my family are Catholics. I can talk Catholic dogma with the best of them. I just won’t be able to wear my Red Hat Society clothing on campus but I don't wear it anywhere else but with the group anyway.

Speaking about the Red Hatters, tomorrow we have a tea. Thursday my cleaning girl comes, Friday is Movie and Lunch Club and Saturday I trek south to attend a baby shower for the daughter-in-law of one of my two favorite nieces. Finally, my family is growing and so is my ability to day-dream again. ©

Poems and St. Patrick's Day Parties

This morning while writing [bad] poetry just for the challenge of doing it, I almost made myself late for the St. Patrick’s Day luncheon at the senior hall. You can’t be late for those events if you want to sit at a table facing the entertainment. The luck of the Irish was with me and I scored a chair up front at a table that turned out to be The Catholic table. Of the eight people sitting there I was the only one who didn’t have a Catholic school girl tale to tell. Nationality, of course, came up as we enjoyed our corn beef and cabbage and when the others heard I’m half Italian one of them questioned how I escaped being Catholic.

I told them the story of a time when my dad was eight years old and a Catholic priest, while teaching Sunday school, thought my dad had thrown a spitball. So the priest opened the doors on a potbelly stove, picked my dad up by the seat of his pants and the collar of his shirt and pretended he was going to throw Dad in to teach him about the fires of hell where bad boys go. After that my dad refused to go back there and while his siblings continued growing up Catholic my dad was sent off to the only other church in town, a Methodist. One of the ladies at the table, in a deadly serious tone said, “Why, that wasn’t very Christian of the priest!” About the third time she said it and someone else agreed that "it wasn’t, indeed, very Christian of him" I was laughing so hard I could have peed my pants, but it's difficult to explain why it struck me funny. I guess you had to be there to hear the Captain Obvious quality of her shocked sensibilities. "What was the priest's name?" "Where was the church?" You would have thought the incident happened last Sunday.  Note to self: Don't tell stories about child abusing priests while sitting at a table full of Catholics.

The entertainment portion of the luncheon was surprisingly good and feathered a one-man band/Irish singer who played a guitar, harmonic and Celtic Bodhran (Irish drum). If Bono had walked in to join him, I wouldn’t have been surprised; he was that good. After an hour’s worth of drinking songs, protest songs, Irish ballets and a few rounds of “Oh, Danny Boy” I was in a great mood and wishing I didn’t have to go home to an empty house with only a dog of German decent to greet me. For a brief moment it crossed my mind to swing by the humane society to see if they had any Irish setters or wolfhounds to bring home to Levi, the schnauzer. He's been asking for a sibling.

My husband was proud of his Irish heritage and St. Patrick’s Day was always a special holiday for him. He’d put on his green tee-shirt, dig out the green, plastic beads and tell a few jokes using an Irish brogue. We’d find parties to go to when we could and he brought green flowers to his mother when she was alive. Every year we'd watch for shamrock plants to appear in the store so we could bring one home and in the spring we'd "turn it loose" outside. Monday at the grocery store I saw a display of shamrocks in the plant & garden center and for the first time in decades, I didn’t buy one. And I’m at peace with that. ©


My Dog Poem  (Inspired by a comment on my last blog entry)

Outside a rabbit sits still in the early light of day

The dog peeks through the mini blinds and bays.

It’s their way every day of waking up the widow

Before the sun smacks trees out of the shadows.

In the bathroom the widow answers nature’s call

As the dog curls himself back up into a sleepy ball

And the rabbit runs off across the lawns to trigger

The next four-legged alarm looking for adventure.

She makes her way across the dim, silent house
Past the empty chair that once held her spouse.
And in the murky kitchen light she stands wating
As hot, steaming liquid spits out a single serving.

Cup in hand the widow sits down at her keyboard

Hoping to wake up her thoughts that are moored

Just off shore in that dim, murky place in between

Awake and night dreams of being again eighteen.

One day the gray rabbit will sit, the dog will bay

And the worn-out widow will not wake up to play

Today, though, she will slid on down her driveway

And go bond with the others running out of days. © J.Riva 2014

Update: I saw a shamrock plant at the store this week and bought it. After DNA testing I learned I have more reason than I previously believed to celebrate this holiday.  2019